Mustang Daily leaves College Publisher, launches Wordpress site

Posted by Lauren Rabaino on 4/13/09 • Categorized as College Publisher, Websites, Wordpress

(Full disclosure: CICM intern Lauren Rabaino is the online and multimedia editor for mustangdaily.net).

Today marks the end of one long journey and the start of a new one for me as the online editor of the Mustang Daily. Even before I was online editor, I had a vision of making the Mustang Daily's Web site something spectacular, and that vision has come full circle with the launch of our new Wordpress site, hosted and supported by CoPress.

The Mustang Daily has been with College Publisher since 2006 when CP bought over New Digital Media. Since the launch around 11 p.m. yesterday, a common question is, "How long did the switch take?" Here is a brief timeline:

December 2008: I first heard about CoPress via Twitter and instantly DMed them for details
January 2009: E-mailed CoPress informing them that we were "very seriously" interested in joining
Late February 2009: Acquired access to our College Publisher archive
Late March 2009: College Publisher database transfer was complete; we started working on customizing our design
April 2009: Official launch

About four months after I first heard of CoPress, my the new site is up and running. That's a quick turnaround (thanks CoPress).

The switch goes far beyond design. Structural changes that come with the new site:

Hired an additional copy editor
Rescheduled the copy editors to work day shifts (and shorter night shifts) so we can post web-first
Trained all reporters and editors to post straight to Wordpress (instead of e-mailing articles and saving them on our server)

Now that I don't have as much responsibility for posting articles, I plan to spend more time working with reporters to develop high-quality multimedia. With full control of the site, you can also expect to see more web-only content (see my earlier post about features I'm working on).

We welcome any suggestions on how we can improve the site so far. We've already received and followed through with a few suggestions from Twitter followers, we'd love to hear yours.

Viewing 10 Comments

alexransom 1 week ago 1 point
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CoPress is shutting down. :(

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Katie 11 months ago 1 point
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The site looks great! Did you do all of the design in-house, or did you start with a WordPress theme and tweak from there? How much CSS experience did your lead designer have going into the project? We're looking at overhauling our site, but I have to admit, we're absolutely beginners on the design end of things — would love to hear about how you tackled the aesthetics.

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Lauren Rabaino 11 months ago 1 point
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We used a Woo theme and tweaked it ever so slightly. You really don't need CSS skills for wordpress. CSS is by no means my strongest area. I've learned everything I know about CSS from Googling tutorials. Everyone is a beginner at some point! Start teaching yourselves

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Katie 10 months ago 1 point
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Thanks, Lauren. Another question for you — what made you choose Wordpress over Drupal (or any other CMS) web site? Are you happy with it so far? Any downsides?

Thanks so much!

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scmurley 11 months ago 1 point
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You can use a firefox plugin called web developer toolbar (or others) to change CSS on the fly, and then make final changes in the wordpress templates. It's a great way to "sandbox."

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Brad Arendt 11 months ago 1 point
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I'm curious about the business/ad end of things. How are you running/managing ads on your site and what about ads in the email update? I just subscribed to your email update so am curious to see what it looks like.

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Lauren 11 months ago 1 point
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The running and managing of ads on our site is pretty much the same as before, except that now we have full control of priority slots, we have more slots and the ability to do cool things (like the page peel we have now-- some think it's cool, some say it's annoying, you can decide).

I actually hadn't thought about ads on the e-mail edition. I'm not sure if there's a way to do that through Feed Burner. Great suggestion.

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Brad Arendt 11 months ago 1 point
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I understand you have more control of the position of ads on your site but I'm curious about the backend management. In other words, is it easier than what it was under CP4, which was limited.

I did notice you are using Feed Burner and trying to figure that out myself. Email ads are a huge success for us, but under CP4 only have one spot to sell. It has been sold out for the past two years now and we could easily sell at least one, if not two more ads.

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Andrew O'Dell 11 months ago 1 point
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Great job. The site looks great. One other question related to the financing of online journalism. Have you guys built any other revenue generators into the site (or do you have any planned?) other than advertising?

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http://www.studlife.com

Lauren Rabaino 11 months ago 1 point
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Nothing more than advertising yet. Our ads department is still heavily in the print mindset unfortunately. Soon, though.

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